An alliance of organisations believes legally-binding targets are the only way to put the UK’s food system on the path to a more sustainable, resilient future.
Food Matters.
Food 2030.
Childhood Obesity: A plan for action.
Health and Harmony.
The Good Food Cycle.
These are just a handful of the UK Government food strategy documents to have been pumped out of Whitehall during the past 20 years. The strategies have varied in their scope and ambition. Some piecemeal policies, like the soft drinks industry levy (SDIL), have been successfully delivered. Yet what all these strategies have in common is their collective failure to put the UK’s food system on a more sustainable pathway. Obesity rates continue to rise. Food price shocks are becoming ever more frequent and severe. Emissions from agriculture remain stubbornly high, while the natural environment on which food production depends – from our soils to our rivers – is in a degraded state.
This is the context for a new campaign calling for the UK Government to deliver a Good Food Bill. Proponents say that only by having food system targets written into legislation can they withstand a continuous cycle of political change characterised by shifting priorities and ideologies and shaped by industry lobbying.
At a parliamentary reception in Westminster last week, The Food Foundation set out the case for a Good Food Bill alongside fellow NGOs, Sustain and Green Alliance, watched by a room of supporters from academia, civil society, business and politics.
The group’s thesis is that our current food system is failing households, farmers and the economy with serious consequences for health, food security and resilience. Ripple effects from the conflict in Iran mean we are on the verge of the third big shock to the food system in the space of just six years following the Covid-19 pandemic and Ukraine war. Yet there remains a sense that, while food businesses and citizens are living and breathing inflationary pressures with the risk of worse to come, talk of a food system in crisis is still getting short shrift within Whitehall.
A Good Food Bill would set legally-binding targets to inform future policy design, rather than detail every policy needed to deliver them. It would build on policies already delivered or under development such as junk food advertising bans, new school food and public sector buying standards, and mandatory health reporting. These are policies that have been pushed for by campaigners often with the support of progressive businesses, but are at risk of being axed or unpicked by future governments of a different ideological persuasion.
A statutory framework for food would provide long-term stability, say proponents. This benefits businesses who want to know their long-term investments in areas like nutrition and sustainability will deliver predictable returns. Bidfood, Elior and Sodexo joined other businesses including Marks & Spencer, Danone and Co-op Group in signing a statement last month calling for a bill that ensures progress in tackling key challenges relating to food security and supply is not derailed by shifting political priorities.
Resilience has become the watchword for food businesses seeking to ensure a secure supply of affordable ingredients. But companies can only do so much within their own sphere of influence. Regulatory certainty is a valuable currency in boardrooms. A statutory framework for food is the foundation upon which everything else is built, according to a bill’s proponents.
Linking supply and demand
So what exactly are they calling for?
In a briefing paper published last week, The Food Foundation and its partners said legislation would support two core and complementary objectives: to secure a resilient domestic supply of nutritious food produced in ways that support environmental sustainability, and to reshape England’s food supply and food environment so that affordable, nutritious and sustainably produced food becomes the default and most accessible choice for everyone.
The point about linking supply with demand is key in the context of a UK food policy that has historically failed to clearly link what farmers should be incentivised to produce and what as a nation we should be encouraged to eat. Footprint has written before about the perverse situation in sugar where production has historically benefited from subsidies while consumption is taxed through VAT and more recently the targeted SDIL.
As to what the bill should include, the group believes headline targets should focus on reducing childhood obesity, increasing production and consumption of home grown fruit and vegetables, and reducing food insecurity.
Policy should be guided, they say, by a reference diet that defines what affordable, nutritious and sustainable eating looks like, in recognition that no UK reference diet currently aligns with climate and sustainability goals.
Good food action plans should be published every five years setting out how the government will meet the targets, with duties placed on ministers to consider the targets and reference diet when making decisions that affect food, including health, agriculture, planning and trade.
A bill would also see food incorporated into local plans so that local authorities can support national goals and strengthen local food systems.
It is proposed that the Food Standards Agency would provide independent oversight to ensure delivery and accountability, a nod to the fact that there is no appetite within government to create a new arm’s length body.
Cross-party consensus
Speaking at the Westminster reception, The Food Foundation’s chief executive Anna Taylor noted how statutory targets force the machinery of government to align around their delivery. Oft-cited research titled ‘Who makes food policy in England?’ by the academic, Kelly Parsons, identified at least 16 different government departments and public bodies responsible for various aspects of food policy in England. The research served to show how food policy is often made in siloes with little or no communication between departments, often leading to conflicting aims and perverse outcomes. The creation of a legally binding set of targets forces ministers to work across departments to meet them, as is the case with the Climate Change Act which remains the backbone of climate policy 18 years after it was passed into law.
There is always the risk a future government will try to unpick the legislation if it doesn’t align with its aims. Reform, for example, has already pledged to abandon the UK’s legally binding 2050 net-zero target established by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. But repealing primary legislation is not a straightforward process, a point made by Taylor on a new episode of Footprint’s The Small Print podcast to be broadcast this week
Taylor, moreover, believes there is cross-party consensus on some of the overarching aims of the proposed Good Food Bill, such as improving child health and ensuring a long-term resilient food supply in the face of climate and geopolitical instability.
Vulnerable strategy
As the food and farming minister in Defra, Daniel Zeichner was the architect of the Good Food Cycle policy paper, which won widespread praise when it was published in July 2025. I noted at the time the sophistication of its diagnosis of the problems facing our food system. Yet the paper is also an example of how a mere strategy is vulnerable to changes in the political weather. The document was noticeably big on principles and outcomes and light on actions to achieve these. A follow-up paper is expected later this year but by that point the conflict in the Middle East may have sent food and energy prices back into orbit; what prospect then of a government pushing through interventionist policies that could in the short-term fuel inflationary pressures?
Zeichner was present at the reception last week during which he offered some words of wisdom for those pushing for a Good Food Bill. He urged the group to be focused in their approach, noting how you need strong, tight arguments to get a bill through Parliament. More optimistically, Zeichner said there is an opportunity to press home the argument in Whitehall with food security and resilience currently under the microscope.
The brief presence at the event of Zeichner’s successor at Defra, Angela Eagle, was a further signal that a window of opportunity may just be presenting itself. Helpfully, Eagle is renowned within Westminster for her ability to work across government departments to get things done.
Still, the scale of the task ahead remains huge as evidenced by the path trodden in Scotland. Calls for an act of parliament to underpin the country’s food policy began around a decade ago, led by civil society organisations. It took until 2022 for the bill to receive royal ascent, becoming the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act, and only in December 2025 was the first national Good Food Nation Plan laid before the Scottish Government.
Yet Scotland’s example proves that alliances can be built and compromises made in order to get such a landmark piece of legislation across the line. The question being asked by supporters of the Good Food Bill in Westminster last week was: ‘If not now, when?’
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